by J. N. Chaney
Damn. No back up this time.
He felt his body being dragged and heard voices shouting but it was all behind a layer of fog.
The last thing he saw was one last HUD message flashing across Craig’s vision.
PRESCOTT: KIA
RETRIEVAL DATE: 2486.02.11
33
A bright light shone down into Warren’s eyes.
No, he thought. Not even going there.
All he wanted was a new leg. As his mind woke up, he started to make sense of things. The surgery. Had it been successful?
He tried to wiggle his toes and felt them move on both feet. That could be phantom movement though, he thought, trying not to get too excited. Deciding the only way to find out for sure was to open his eyes, Warren did just that.
Glancing down, he saw his body covered with a white hospital sheet. Two bumps near the bottom of the bed seemed to indicate he now had two feet. Concentrating, he wiggled them again. A smile nearly split his face in two when both moved on his command.
“It worked!”
“Warren?”
A voice to his right had Warren jerking his head up. A man stood near his bed dressed in a white lab coat.
It wasn’t Dr. Burgess, but something about him was familiar. “Who are you?”
“My name is Hendrose. I’m here to help you. Do you know what year it is?”
Warren laughed. “Of course. 2051.”
Hendrose shook his head and offered a sheepish smile. “Try 2486. But that’s okay, we’re going to get you fixed up, my friend.”
“2486? That’s some joke, doc.”
“I’m not joking, Warren. Does this room look like anything you’ve ever seen before?” Hendrose swept an arm to encompass the room.
For the first time, Warren noticed his surroundings. He wasn’t in a hospital room. It was like an infirmary, but something about it was strange. Lots of things were strange, now that he looked. The walls were metal and didn’t have a single window. The equipment around him, while similar to hospital devices he knew, looked upgraded and foreign.
What the hell?
“I know you’re confused,” Hendrose continued. “But I hope it’s temporary. Craig and I attempted a back up before you bit it, so we’ll try and get it uploaded.”
Warren stared at the man as if he’d grown another head. “Doc, I gotta say. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The tech smiled. “No, I don’t suppose you do. Lay still, would you?”
A second later, a message flashed in Warren’s vision, startling him.
BACKUP STARTED
It began to rain—but in reverse. Copies of every pixel making up the rolling hills were separating, one at a time, then two, then a thousand. The new pixels drifted up into the sky, melding with swirling, dense clouds that seemed so far away. It was beautiful, yet at the same time, seemed mournful. It was like the release of doves at a funeral. A farewell. A goodbye.
He knew what was happening. The pixels it looked like he was standing on were his memories. Each one was a tiny piece of the person he had become. Each one, a single thought, a prejudice, a reaction. Together they formed memories, experiences, and knowledge.
Somewhere among those pixels were the instructions on how to tie his shoes. Somewhere else was the vague memory of what coffee tasted like. Another area undoubtedly held the horrifying memory of being sliced open while he was still awake on an operating table. It was a memory he no longer wanted and wished would somehow just go away.
The pain had been incredible, but it hadn’t been the worst part of the experience. No, the worst part was the confusion, the sense of betrayal, and not knowing when it would stop. They had no business in his chest. He was there to get a new leg. Why won’t they stop? They’re making a mistake! Why are they doing this?
“Make them stop!”
He wasn’t sure if he’d said the words out loud, but in the virtual landscape, his voice seemed to expire into nothing the moment it passed his lips. All the screaming in the world wouldn’t have stopped the pain. He’d tried. He hadn’t been able to. He couldn’t blink, fight the tube they shoved down his throat—nothing. Maybe he should’ve tried harder. He could have told them why he was there.
If he’d been able to communicate—to tell them he wasn’t interested in becoming a cyborg—maybe they would’ve stopped. Maybe. Probably not. That’s probably why the doctor had drugged him right away, so he couldn’t say no.
The landscape of his mind shuddered in response to the feelings the memory had dragged to the surface. Even though it had been more than four hundred years ago, it still felt fresh and raw.
Warren wondered if he could forget what had happened—if there was a way to manipulate his memories so he could take out the bad ones that haunted him centuries later. He couldn’t forget them on his own. Every time he was reset, the memories were reset, too. Maybe I can reach up, grab them from the backup, and crush them in my hands.
What do my coworkers think happened to me? The thought was silly, of course, but it rose to the surface like a bloated corpse from the bottom of a lake. It wasn’t something he could ignore.
The women he’d worked with were all long dead. So were their children. So were their grandchildren. Whatever they’d gone through, it had happened so long ago, even if one of them wrote about it, there’d be no way to find the record. The US Government had either told them, or not, but it didn’t matter. Still, it seemed like a cruel thing to do to them. He wondered if any of them ever thought about him when they were still alive. Maybe they’d met later on, but the government had erased the memory to try to keep him from holding onto the past. In that case, why didn’t they erase the memory of the botched surgery? The landscape shuddered again.
RELAX! KEEP HAVING TO ADJUST.
Someone was talking to him. Probably Hendrose, one of his most trusted allies, next to Lukov. He’d been the one to help him free himself and the others from the Republic’s control. He’d put himself directly in harm’s way, trusting Warren to do the right thing. These people have a lot more faith than me.
It couldn’t have been easy. Had Hendrose been captured—had the plan not gone off the way it had—the Republic would have made an example out of him. Public execution would’ve been too easy. They would’ve humiliated him. Ruined the lives of his family and friends. Probably arrested or killed them all in retaliation.
“Revolution.” He wasn’t sure if he’d said it out loud, but the idea shook the virtual world again. If the Republic had a revolution to deal with, they’d certainly be too busy to deal with one lone planet out on the edge of their zone of control. If the idea spread to include entire planets, the Republic would have to send troops, maybe cyborgs, out to deal with it. Reotis was as good as lost. They wouldn’t want to lose any more—not if they were smart. The notion was tantalizing.
Another thought wasn’t. He wondered if the struggle was worth it. Hendrose wanted him to relax. Maybe not doing so was dangerous. Maybe if he got himself good and worked up, he could spoil the backup and ruin any chance at recovery. He could stop suffering. The rest of eternity would be someone else’s problem. Maybe then he could finally get some rest. Maybe then he could finally stop thinking about the surgery, the pain, the horror.
“You can do this,” a voice whispered from somewhere up above. He lifted his eyes, but only saw the cloud of tiny green dots. The voice belonged to Anita. She’d given him a pep talk before he’d been smuggled from the battlefield to undergo a painful test to see if cyborgs could, in fact, be released from their virtual chains. She’d believed in him. He hadn’t let her down. No matter what, he’d done his part.
But people were still counting on him. People who were leaning on him to make the right decisions. People who needed him to survive. They were cyborgs and Reotians. They were worried about him. The woman said he was the best. If he didn’t carry on, he’d be letting her down. And her little boy. And everyone else.
CLEAR YOUR MIND
Warren
tried, but alone with his thoughts and his memories, it was easier said than done. Maybe it wasn’t his mind, so much as it was his emotions. Everything mattered, and everything seemed to be associated with a feeling.
So many pixels out there in the landscape of his mind. Each one was a fragment of a memory. What would happen if he loaded them all? Would he benefit from remembering everything the Republic had made him do, or would he instantly go mad like Craig.
Poor Craig. There had to be something Warren could do for him. There had to be some way to get the man healthy. The idea of a healthy Craig made Warren feel happy, as if he had a real purpose again besides warfighting. He’d find a way to help the other cyborg recover from his trauma. Maybe take on Craig as his own personal project and, little by little, heal the mind within the cybernetic body.
The thought brought him to a new level of peace, and the reverse rain began to move faster and faster. He was relaxed. He had a reason to exist and keep fighting, no matter how tough things got. Warren would live, even if it was only for others and not himself.
Epilogue
Slowly, Warren became aware of light, of sounds, and the temperature of his skin. It was a little chilly, but not bad. The air was fresh, but clinically sterile. His body was lying horizontal on something cold, flat, and hard. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, but he felt pretty good.
TIME SINCE LAST BACKUP: 22 MINUTES, 14 SECONDS
He opened his eyes and was delighted they were working again. He was not delighted to see Craig’s face, looking both curious and worried, filling his vision.
“If you kiss me, I’ll make you rake the whole fucking planet,” Warren said.
Craig smiled. “Yeah, he’s fine.”
“I am fine,” Warren said, sitting up and spotting Hendrose, Lukov, Rigby, and Cooper. “Why do you all seem so concerned? He didn’t try giving me mouth-to-mouth, did he?”
Craig shrugged. “Doc said there was some trouble getting your backup completed,” he continued. “Said you were fighting it or something. I figured he might’ve given you brain damage—not that anyone would be able to tell, right?”
The others laughed. Warren fought hard to keep a smile from his face.
“What happened in there?” Rigby asked. She looked more concerned than Warren could remember seeing her before.
He shrugged. “Old memories coming back to haunt me. It’s stuff I can’t seem to shake, no matter how hard I try. They seemed to be a lot more vivid in the virtual world. To be honest, I thought about screwing up the backup altogether. You know, punching out—retiring.”
“You mean forcing a deletion,” Rigby said, placing her hands on her hips and glaring at him. “You were seriously considering that after all we’ve done?”
“Yes,” he said. “But not anymore. How am I here, anyway? You too, Rigby. I thought Hoffman destroyed the backups.”
“You have Craig to thank for that,” Hendrose explained. Once he found out the spy was starting to set his plan in motion, he swapped the backup prism for a blank. Saved our asses.
Warren hid his surprise, or so he hoped. “That was good work, Craig. Thank you.”
The cyborg in question lifted a shoulder. “I wasn’t going to let that asshole kill my friends. Not when I just started living again. How are you feeling? Hendrose and I weren’t sure the backup completed before you kicked the bucket.”
“Yeah, I think so,” Warren answered.
“Physically, he’s fine,” Hendrose said, tapping commands into a tablet as he stood at the foot of the table.
“I’m fine.” Warren swung his feet onto the floor and stood.
The others examined him for a moment, but none as intensely as Rigby. Once she nodded her satisfaction, everyone else seemed to relax a bit.
“Maybe you should take some time off,” she said. “Go play cards or something. Get your head straight. We don’t need to sleep, but—”
“No,” Warren interrupted. “I need to get dressed and start planning for the next phase. I’ll rest when I feel like I can. Right now, there are more important things to do.”
“He is right,” Lukov said, speaking for the first time. “Hoffman sent a message while he was in the CUP.”
Warren’s head snapped up. “To who?”
“We’re still working on it,” Hendrose said. From the way his brow furrowed, they weren’t having much luck there. “However, I do have a theory about the Commonwealth ship that wasn’t manned. It either had to be close enough to lie in wait for a Republic vessel to happen by, or something must’ve signaled it.”
“Yeah,” Warren agreed. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. I take it you have an idea on how the signal was sent?”
Hendrose nodded. “The only place that would’ve been close enough to see the Republic ship show up and still far enough away with time to summon that thing had to be on the moon.”
Warren cracked a grin and pulled the sheet back to swing his legs over the side of the bed. “Then that’s where we need to go next.”
Continue reading for BUILT TO LAST…
1
Warren resisted the urge to jerk back when a shower of sparks showered over him. It wasn’t as though his cyborg chassis could be injured by such a small thing.
“Not there,” he said to the young man holding the portable welder, trying to stay patient.
Linus yanked the tool away from the metal plates he was about to permanently bond together like he’d been shocked. “What?” he asked. “Not these?”
“Not unless you want to prevent whoever moves into this place from ever getting inside,” Warren said with a laugh. “That’s going to be the doorway.”
Linus raised his brows and leaned back. While still holding on to the ladder he was standing on, he studied the salvaged metal in front of him. “Oh,” he said, once he’d taken in the bigger picture. “Right. Boy, they’d be pissed if they had to cut the door open just to go to bed, huh?”
“Something like that,” Warren said. The kid was always joking, and though Warren was annoyed, he reminded himself that he’d probably been exactly like him when he was young—nearly four hundred years ago. Although most of his memories had been recovered, as far as he could tell, his teenage years were still foggy. He wondered if being reset—brought back to life by having his memories implanted into a new cybernetic body—had made him lose some of his oldest recollections. As far as anyone could remember, he’d had to be reset at least eight times.
Jenita Rigby gave Warren a look that said she was also getting tired of coaching Linus and putting up with his jokes. She added a small smile, probably to let him know she wasn’t angry. Even though her skin, eyes, and perfect teeth were artificial—the result of her being a cyborg—Warren couldn’t help but think how pretty she was.
The cyborgs had each been designed to look like they had when they were still fully human. It was thought that doing so would help ease the transition so it wouldn’t be such a shock to their psyche.
Warren leaned to his right a little to try to get a better look at the door, but couldn’t step away from the heavy piece of metal, prompting him to wonder about the weight.
SCRAP METAL EST WEIGHT: 153.2 KG
He’d grown used to the constant interruptions whenever he wondered at anything. They weren’t usually useful, but they no longer made him feel like someone was standing over his shoulder, correcting every little mistake he made.
The scrap metal was part of a recently destroyed Commonwealth of Worlds, or CoW, ship. Six Reotians were cutting the massive vessel into pieces, bringing the bits back like ants dissecting a caterpillar.
“That’s the spot,” Rigby said. “Remember, keep your angle the same throughout the weld and use your welding mask. Otherwise, you’ll get a sunburn, go blind, lose your hair, and end up a cyborg like me.”
“Really?” Linus asked.
“No, but do it anyway,” Rigby replied.
Now that the colony of people on the planet Reotis had exp
osed themselves as a rebellion of sorts, they needed new homes for the refugees who kept showing up. At least one ship per week, often filled with people seeking to escape from the Grand Republic of Unified Systems or the Commonwealth, landed or crashed on the surface. Most were in bad shape. Rather than adding to the number of vehicles available for transport, they added to the growing collection of spare parts.
Some of the people nearby looked to be growing impatient with how slow Linus was progressing through the simple assembly. Until he was done, there wasn’t much they could do except organize supplies, clean tools, and talk, which was what they were doing now. That, and glaring at the young man.
“Hey, boss,” an older man with a mustache that completely hid his mouth said. “How’s about letting me do this part. I’m pretty good with the welder.”
“No,” Warren said. “He needs the experience. Everyone does. How would you like to be stuck with the only person who didn’t know how to use a welder the next time the Republic or Commonwealth attacked?”
The man opened his mouth, closed it, then shrugged. “It’s just that we’ve got another thirty of these to do, and the refugees have already been waiting a while.”
“I’m aware of that,” said Warren. “But I want him to complete this one now that he’s started it, so please wait.”
The man took a step back and sat down on a gray plastic storage box. He looked like he might be toying with the idea of protesting some more, but so far he was keeping his thoughts to himself.
“That’s the spot,” Rigby said. She was watching Linus weld as sparks fell from the boy’s work and danced across her face. Her cybernetic eyes were too tough to be damaged by the tiny molten bits of metal. Since they weren’t organic, they didn’t suffer ill effects of looking directly at the arc, either.
